Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/418

THE GOLDEN BOWL extraordinary perversity that the very opposite effect was produced—!" With the renewed vision of this fatality, however, she could give but a desperate shrug.

"I see," the Colonel sympathetically mused. "That was a rum start."

But his very response, as she again flung up her arms, seemed to make her sense for a moment intolerable. "Yes—there I am! I was really at the bottom of it," she declared; "I don't know what possessed me but I planned for him, I goaded him on." With which, however, the next moment, she took herself up. "Or rather I do know what possessed me—for wasn't he beset with ravening women, right and left, and didn't he quite pathetically appeal for protection, didn't he quite charmingly show one how he needed and desired it? Maggie," she thus lucidly continued, "couldn't, with a new life of her own, give herself up to doing for him in the future all she had done in the past—to fencing him in, to keeping him safe and keeping them off. One perceived this," she went on—"out of the abundance of one's affection and one's sympathy." It all blessedly came back to her—when it wasn't all for the fiftieth time obscured, in face of the present facts, by anxiety and compunction. "One was no doubt a meddlesome fool; one always is, to think one sees people's lives for them better than they see them for themselves. But one's excuse here," she insisted, "was that these people clearly didn't see them for themselves—didn't see them at all. It struck one for very pity—that they were making a mess of such charming 388